It shouldn't be surprising that the recent conference at St. John's College, in Santa Fe, entitled “What is Liberal Education For?” should have turned into an occasion for blaming a host of difficult challenges currently faced by the humanities and the liberal arts on critical theory and political correctness. I wasn't there, but that seems to be one of the conference's main preoccupations as reported by Inside Higher Ed in an article entitled “Doing Themselves In?” After all, St. John's, with its great books curriculum, is known for proudly embracing a traditional approach to a liberal arts education. And that's great. The country needs institutions of higher learning that take diverse approaches to humanistic education.

However, it's depressing to see such a thoroughly discredited argument being made in late 2014. The idea put forward by one the conference's major speakers, John Agresto, that the liberal arts are “dying” because of critical theory and the politicization of faculty, is not only overblown. It recycles an old and faulty argument that should have been set aside years ago

What is the evidence for Agresto's claim? According to the Inside Higher Ed article, he cites “worrisome statistics,” including that “English, long a go-to concentration, now accounts for just 3 percent of majors nationwide.” Like similar claims, Agresto's are misleading. For one thing, English has never been a “go-to concentration.” English majors since 1975 have never counted for more than 4.4 percent of all majors. This hardly makes English a “go-to concentration.”

And while his claim suggests there has been some kind of steep fall-off in English majors over the last four decades, that just isn't so. In 1975, as I just noted, English majors constituted 4.4 percent of all majors. In 1980-81, years in which the U.S. experienced an economic recession, that number understandably fell a bit to 3.4 percent. However, by 1995-96, as the economy recovered, it was back up to 4.2 percent, and by 2002-03 it was holding pretty steady at 4.0 percent. There was another small dip in 2007-08 (3.5 percent) and by 2010-11, even with the great recession, it was hanging on at 3.1 percent. If these statistics are any indication, with the economy improving they will go back up a bit.

As an English professor I wish more students were majoring in English, but the fluctuations in the index Agresto cites are hardly all that dramatic. More importantly, the downturns correlate much more strongly with economic recessions in the early 1970s, the early 1990s, and between 2008 and 2010 than they do with the rise of critical theory or an interest in humanities scholars and their students in the relationship between history, philosophy, literature, religion, the arts, and political and social justice issues. It's a simple fact that the evidence for claims like Agresto's that critical theory and political correctness have ruined the liberal arts and humanities just don't hold water. They substitute weak statistical evidence for what are really ideological polemics.

As many researchers I cite in my recent book on the humanities crisis have pointed out, critics of the contemporary humanities like Agresto use 1970 – the historical high point of humanities majors – as the point from which they chart a decline. But enrollments in the humanities have held steady between 1984 and 2010 at about 6.5 percent, with a few upticks between 1988 and 1996. As Ben Schmidt rightly observes “the overall pattern gives the lie to arguments that claim the humanities are being eroded by things like ethnic studies or a departure from the classics. Students aren’t any less interested in majoring in history or English now than they were at the moment deconstructionism hit American shores.”

And while the number of English majors has fallen at some Ivy League institutions, according to Scott Saul (“The Humanities in Crisis? Not at Most Schools”) nationwide humanities majors in English, foreign languages and literatures and the arts have held steady at between 9.8 and 10.6 percent over the last two decades. He notes that according to Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the share of bachelor’s degrees earned in the humanities has stayed remarkably steady between 1987 and 2010 (10 percent in 1987, and about 11 percent in 2010, with some brief fluctuations up during the overall period). Saul echoes Schmidt in pointing out that these statistics suggest that “we must straighten out one of the great misconceptions that has circulated around humanities professors: that we are a trendy lot, ‘tenured radicals’ wrenching the curriculum into irrelevance as we impose the latest theoretical paradigm upon it.”

If the liberal arts and humanities are in trouble, and in many ways they are, these troubles have little to do with the development of new theories, methodologies, and subject matters. Indeed, such developments ought to be welcome in higher education. Those of us who teach literature, history, religious studies, and the arts are professors, after all, professionals whose work is expected by our colleagues in the natural and social sciences to be theoretically and methodologically rigorous. It's a myth that the sciences have theories and methods and the humanities don't, and it's a mistake to scapegoat theory and professionalization for the current plight of the humanities and liberal arts.

Inside Higher Ed reported that, according to Agresto, in order to “save the humanities” from the pernicious effects of critical theory we must instill “critical thinking skills.” However, it makes no sense to claim the liberal arts are about critical thinking, and then to trash critical theory, which teaches critical thinking. Humanism was about nothing if it wasn't about critiquing the status quo. And how can the liberal arts be blamed for causing their own ruin by connecting questions about the human to the world of politics and social justice when humanism has always been all about raising questions about political and social agency? Traditionalists like Agresto and Andrew Delbanco, a professor of English at Columbia University who has frequently advocated for a traditional approach to the humanities that eschews critique, too often seem to want to seal the liberal arts off from such issues (and worse still, to protect them from constructive criticism). In doing so they're actually undermining the very tradition they claim to defend.

The big problem here is that critics like Agresto and Delbanco don't spend enough time analyzing the real plight of the liberal arts and humanities. That plight has a lot more to do with a set of economic and institutional problems that threaten colleges and universities everywhere. It's just that the fallout from these problems has hit the humanities disproportionately hard because we're in a weaker position than the natural and social sciences to stake a claim for the centrality of the subjects we research and teach at a time when the traditional liberal arts model for measuring the value of a higher education has begun to shift to a corporate one.

The corporatization of higher education represents a dramatic shift toward seeing higher education as vocational training, an educational experience geared to credentialing, in which the value of courses and programs are defined narrowly in terms of their practical vocational utility. It's not surprising that these developments have hit the humanities particularly hard, that our disciplines are so vulnerable in an age that increasingly puts the educational emphasis on computational, technological, and mechanical skills at the expense of a broad-based education in history, philosophy, and the arts. If the value of education is increasingly being measured by trustees and legislators too ready to replace a liberal arts model of higher education with a vocational training model of higher education, then it's no wonder the humanities seem to be in crisis.

This means that defending the integrity of the humanities today ought to have little if anything to do with bashing theory or calling for a return to “tradition” (on the drawbacks of arguments based on tradition, see Judge Richard Posner's brilliant analysis in his recent decision on gay marriage in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.). That's simply indulging in ideological battles that distract us from our real problems. Engaging those problems means defending the integrity of higher education. It means resisting the marginalizing of faculty voices in academic and curricular matters, resisting the institution of managerial structures at colleges and universities that lead to bloated bureaucracies and an over investment in non-curricular matters broadly related to “student life” at the expense of investing in more tenure-track faculty, more classrooms, and more support for a broad liberal arts education. But at the same time it means finding a way to articulate the value of a humanities education that stresses both our traditional commitment to the intangible -- rewards that Agresto and Delbanco rightly point out come from studying philosophy, history, literature and the arts -- while also stressing what is new and innovative about the humanities in the 21st century, and the transferable skills they impart to students.

I don't think it will do to simply fall back on well-worn, boilerplate defenses of the humanities that characterize their value narrowly in terms of the inner journey they promote and the big questions they pose, as a place where we can help our students to discover the meaning of life and to find themselves. Such defenses are too often elegiac -- laments for the passing of what often looks like an overly narrow, idealized, or even sentimental vision of what the humanities were, one that simply feeds the idea they're a little quaint and outdated. Don't get me wrong. I embrace the idea that studying the humanities has a value for its own sake, and I'm deeply committed to the idea that the liberal arts ought to be a place where our preoccupation with the practical and the utilitarian can be submitted to constructive critical scrutiny.

But I believe that in the 21st century we need to present a broader, more nuanced, innovative and forward-looking vision of the humanities, and that such a vision need not be seen as a betrayal of what we have always been doing. We need to characterize the value of the humanities in a way that stresses not just the inner nourishment they can bring, but the reading, analytical, research, writing, and critical thinking skills humanities courses teach our students as well, skills that are manifestly transferable to a range of employment opportunities (for more on this argument see the article I co-authored with Gerald Graff, “Fear of Being Useful”).

And crucially, it also means stressing the innovative, even transformative work that has unfolded in the humanities over the last 30 or 40 years, work that has served to reshape our understanding of the human and to challenge our ideas about liberty, agency, responsibility, social justice, and the relationship between humans, technology, and the biosphere in which we all live. We do a disservice to ourselves when, in explaining what we do in the humanities, or in defending their value, we play down or disparage the innovative role that theory has had in deepening, enriching, and challenging our understanding of the human, especially in the attention it has insisted we pay to the complex ways in which social and political power flows through cultural forms and shapes human subjectivity. Our challenge is not simply to defend the humanities, but to defend a new humanities, one in part defined by a critique of the very humanism that historically defined the humanities in the first place. It simply won't do to pretend that the last 30 or 40 years never happened, or worse still, to blame productive innovation during those years for challenges that are in reality economic and institutional.

Sixty years ago this month, the U.S. Post Office declared a small journal called ONE: The Homosexual Magazine, published in Los Angeles, to be obscene and thus unlawful to distribute through the mail. All copies of the latest issue were seized and presumably destroyed.

The editors -- having already endured a letter-writing campaign from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that tried to get them fired from their day jobs -- cannot have been that surprised by the postal service’s move. Still, the characterization of ONE as “cheap pornography” (in one judge’s words) was ludicrous. Recent issues had included articles on police entrapment, Walt Whitman, and attitudes toward homosexuality in Britain throughout history. The editors also published a sonnet by William Shakespeare and a salute to the “history-making TV appearance [of] Curtis White of Los Angeles [who] personally stated that he is a homosexual.”

By no stretch of the imagination was it fair to call ONE obscene. At worst, it was feisty. But that was much the same thing at a time when “homosexuals were virtually without constitutional rights,” as Walter Frank put it in Law and the Gay Rights Story: The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy (Rutgers University Press). The turning point came when the Supreme Court overruled the USPS ban on ONE in 1958. The decision was little-noticed at the time -- and it doesn’t even register as a blip in the general public’s historical memory, in which the gay rights struggle began, more or less, with Stonewall.

The Supreme Court decision ran to one sentence and cited the Court’s ruling in Roth v. United States, two years earlier. The author of Law and the Gay Rights Struggle is co-chair of the Law and Literature Committee of the New York County Lawyers Association, and takes for granted closer familiarity with Roth v. U.S. than most non-jurists will possess. (I could have told you that the plaintiff was Samuel, a publisher of girlie magazines, and not Phillip, the novelist -- though not much more.) But upon looking up the decision, it’s fairly easy to spot what has to have been the crucial passage with respect to ONE:

“Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest. The portrayal of sex, e.g., in art, literature and scientific works is not itself sufficient reason to deny material the constitutional protection of freedom of speech and press. Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest and public concern.”

That it is. And a major strategy of early gay-rights advocates was to insist on the “absorbing interest to mankind through the ages” part with respect to same-sex desire. (Hence the Shakespeare sonnet in ONE.)

Frank’s purview is narrower, and a lot more democratic. He focuses on the seven decades following the end of World War II – a period in which the struggle for equality moved ever more in the direction of grassroots activism and demands for respect in everyday life. Identifying the illustrious gay dead gave way to more mundane but urgent priorities, like securing hospital visitation rights and protection from housing discrimination.

About half of Law and the Gay Rights Story consists of a succinct overview of how gay and lesbian communities and institutions took root within, and against, “a society that had simply decided to place certain people beyond its protection.” In a provocative formulation (I mean that in a good way) Frank writes that “discrimination itself could remain in the closet because gays themselves were not willing to come forward in sufficient numbers or with sufficient energy to contest it.”

A couple of generations of historians have studied how that situation changed – how the numbers and energy accumulated, and began to make a breach in a system that had effectively limited gays and lesbians to two choices, celibacy or criminality. Frank draws on and synthesizes the social and cultural historians’ work without claiming to go beyond it.

He does build in a distinctive periodization, however, by dividing the past few decades of gay-rights struggle into three phases or waves. The first and longest subsumes everything from ONE to Stonewall to the assassination of Harvey Milk: a cycle of growing confidence and assertiveness, coming to an end around the point when reports of a “gay cancer” emerged in 1981. His second period is defined by the AIDS crisis, in which government neglect and anti-gay political sentiment made the gay struggle largely defensive. A third wave, beginning in the early 1990s and continuing through the present, has seen something of a revival of the first period’s vigor but an even more remarkable growth of acceptance of claims for legal equality -- with the Supreme Court defining as unconstitutional both anti-sodomy laws and the Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage to exclude same-sex couples.

In recent years, Frank writes, “concepts of freedom and equality began to overlap in a way they did not in the first phase, when gays were fighting for the right to celebrate themselves without fear and to be allowed some measure of dignity…. The equality that gays have been fighting for in this [most recent] phase concerns all the freedoms that most people take for granted, including the freedom to marry. As that argument has taken hold, the tide of public opinion has shifted, and with it the terrain on which the battle has been fought.”

In other remarks, the author seems perfectly aware of the potential for backlash. Consider the point of view expressed by a voter regarding an anti-gay ballot initiative: "I don't think being gay is right. It's immoral. It's against all religious beliefs. I don't agree with gays at all, but I don't think they should be discriminated against."

Frank cites this arresting blend of sentiments in a context suggesting that it demonstrates a slow growth of tolerance in seemingly inhospitable circumstances. That's one way to look at it. But politics is always a struggle to shift the terrain on which the battle is being fought, and reversals do occur. That said, I'd like to imagine that the person who contributed to ONE under the name Herbert Grant is still alive and well. In 1954, he wrote an article that might well have been the last straw for the authorities. In it, he proposed that same-sex couples be allowed to marry.

Google Scholar will be 10 years old as of next month. Also coming up fast, early in the new year, is the 10th anniversary of the launching of Inside Higher Ed. Just to be totally clear about it, they were completely unrelated developments, though I do seem to remember each being met with skepticism and reservations, in some quarters. Certain senior academics insisted on calling them both “blogs.” (It was a simpler time.)

Suffice it to say that the beta days soon passed. The world of higher learning has grown ever more dependent on the internet’s intricate system of tubes -- with the academic web now serving as publishing platform and archive, and also as a point of access to restricted or proprietary digital collections. In principle, at least, we ought to be able to determine the dimensions of the scholarly web: how many items it contains (papers, dissertations, conference recordings, etc.), in however many formats, and with whatever depth of indexing and degree of retrievability. But actually taking the measurements is another matter. They belong to the epistemic category Donald Rumsfeld so aptly dubbed “the known unknowns.”

How about posing a narrower question, then? Just how big is Google Scholar? As with the company’s search-engine algorithms, that information remains a trade secret. But a couple of recent studies have tried to sound the depths of Google Scholar – using GS itself.

The earlier of the papers is “The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web” by Madian Khabsa and C. Lee Giles, published in May by PLOS One, the online open access journal. Lee is a professor of information and computer sciences at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where Khabsa is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering.

Their study, conducted in early 2013, started with a pool of 10 papers each from 15 categories used by another search engine, Microsoft Academic Search. The fields covered were agriculture science, arts and humanities, biology, chemistry, computer science, economics and business, engineering, environmental sciences, geosciences, material science, mathematics, medicine, physics, and social sciences, plus multidisciplinary. The researchers then requested from both Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search a list of the distinct incoming citations to each paper. That is, if paper X cited a target paper seven times, it counted only as one citation.

“Overall,” Khabsa and Lee report, “we obtained 41,778 citations from MAS and 86,870 citations from Google Scholar,” including all the metadata available: “the document's title, list of authors, number of citations, year of publications, and the venue of publication (if available).”

The format and range of metadata are not standardized, but with some effort the results from the two search engines could be compared to determine how many items appeared in both -- as well as the number GS had but MAS didn’t, and vice versa. The researchers also determined the degree of overlap in each of the 15 fields, and the percentage of papers available without payment or subscription.

At the time of the experiment, MAS claimed 48.7 million records. Taking into account the degree of overlap, the researchers “estimated Google Scholar to have 99.3 million documents, which is approximately, 87% of the total number of scholarly documents found on the web,” which they determine to be some 114 million items in English, with about a quarter of them freely available.

The share of open-access material varies considerably between fields, of course. At the low end is agricultural science, with 12 percent. Computer science is in the lead, with half of scholarly publications being freely available. (The percentages are broken down by field in the paper’s second table.)

In July, Enrique Orduña-Malea and three other researchers in Spain published “About the Size of Google Scholar: Playing the Numbers” through the site arXiv. The paper begins with an assessment of the methodology and findings of Khabsa and Lee. In particular, Orduña-Malea et al. stress “the low indexation of institutional repositories on Google Scholar” and the GS policy of not indexing files over 5MB, “a procedure which is especially critical for doctoral theses).” They suggest that the earlier study probably underestimates the size of the academic web – even of its strictly Anglophone component -- while overestimating how much of it Google Scholar indexes.

The authors go on to describe a battery of tests designed to measure GS “from the inside,” so to speak. Generally this involved performing searches for particular kinds of documents or search terms, using different temporal filters. For example: the search could be made for patents and citations issued in a century, then by decade within that century, and the result compared.

An intriguing variant is what the authors call an “absurd query,” in which the search is for a very common word likely to be found in most documents, with variations on the search parameters, including temporal filters.

The Khabsa-Lee study came up with the estimate that Google Scholar indexed 99.3 million documents in English. Extrapolating from that, with English accounting for 65 percent of GS material, Orduña-Malea et al. determine that the Khabsa-Lee method yields a total Google Scholar database of 152.7 million documents. (Despite their critique, the authors call Khabsa and Lee’s work “novel and brilliant.”)

The methods that Orduña-Malea and his colleagues tried were not restricted to English-language scholarship. Their findings varied from a low of 126.3 million documents in Google Scholar to a high of 176.8 million.

For their part, the Spanish researchers conclude that a judicious estimate would be in the neighborhood of 160 million items. “However,” they write, “the fact that all methods show great inconsistencies, limitations and uncertainties, makes us wonder why Google does not simply provide this information to the scientific community if the company really knows this figure.”

It’s a fair point, and one the company should answer. Its 10th anniversary might be a good time for Google Scholar to give its users the gift of transparency.